Cry of the Hawk jh-1

by Terry C. Johnston

“Major—why don’t we just burn the sonofabitch out. We can do it real easy—”

  “I want the girl, Hastings!” he shrieked. Then, attempting to gain some self-control, he said, “The colonel wants the girl too. She’s no good to us burned alive.”

  “None of us good to you killed, Major.”

  “You’re not going in there to finish this off, Captain?”

  Hastings hesitated a moment, finally wagging his head. “Never meant to fight a badger buried in a hole—”

  Suddenly the captain was knocked backward a step, still standing, staring down at the tiny hole in his belly, a red blossom slowly spreading around it. He started swiping at the stain with one hand, wide-eyed—

  —a second hole opened up in the center of his chest. Right where Wiser had aimed. Hastings looked up at the major with dull disbelief, trying to raise his own pistol to fire at Wiser.

  Boothog fired a third shot, watching it connect low in the neck, spurting bright blood as Hastings stumbled backward against his men diving helter-skelter for cover. Near Wiser, the last two were scrambling out of the way. Boothog yelled for them to come to him. They did not.

  He emptied one pistol at them taking cover in the dark, shadowy corners of the stable behind him. Then calmly holstered the weapon and shifted the other to his left hand, where he spun the cylinder, methodically checking the caps on each nipple.

  Deciding he would have to finish off this goddamned Gentile himself.

  He had heard the scrape of a boot out the back, too late to do anything about it.

  But Jonah Hook didn’t get back-shot. He had shoved Hattie back down in a dark stall, slapping the horses out into the dusty aisle between the rows of stalls for cover and confusion as he drew his first pistol. As he ducked back into the dark of a far stall, he dragged the Winchester from its scabbard beneath the stirrup fender.

  So that was all he had, Hook thought as he made himself small. Two pistols and a seventeen-shot Model 1866. Maybe, if he was lucky and made each ball count, he could hold both sides of the stable at bay. Whittling them down one by one.

  Then he heard some of them coming, whispering … footsteps from both directions. And he knew if they rushed him like that—it was all but over. He started to move to a crouched position, putting a hand out to steady himself, when he had found the flake of a hay bale. Big enough, he figured.

  He waited, breathless and listening. Then flung the flake into the murky lamplight and shadows, across the aisle into the far row of stalls.

  It had done the trick. The four gunmen spooked, firing into one another. And Jonah had himself made sure of two of them before he ducked back into the darkness once more.

  From the sounds of things, the four were done and out of the way.

  Then he thought on it hard and knew they still might rush him. And that would be the end—unless he put a little more fear into their hearts. More so some downright simple confusion to keep them off balance.

  That’s when he started talking to Hastings, recognizing his voice at the back of the livery. Hearing Wiser at the front of the stable. And glory of glories—it had worked.

  Better than Jonah had hoped: the major shot Hastings. Gone right mad, Wiser had. Mad with frustration, even hate. He heard him shooting up there among the front stalls. Lead smacking wood, scattering hay dust. Gun smoke hanging like dirty gauze, suspended over the stable, made a greasy yellow by the single lamp.

  Wiser was a madman. Shooting at his own men. None of the last shots came Jonah’s way.

  Then some quiet. Quickly sorting it out, Jonah figured Wiser was reloading. Or waiting with that second pistol—wanting Hook to grow impatient and show himself. How Jonah wanted to watch the bastard squirm ….

  More than anything, Hook knew he had to swallow his own hate down now—keep thinking things through or he would not last. Not long enough to get Hattie out of there. And that fear of failing her stabbed something down deep inside him now.

  “I’m with you, Major!” cried a voice from the back of the stable, near the big opened doors.

  “Your glory will be made in Zion, boys!” Wiser called back. “Let’s go in and get the Gentile!”

  Hook stood, sensed where Wiser was, and pulled off two quick shots that barked but bit only stall uprights. Yet before he himself ducked back down, Jonah watched Wiser going for cover.

  Overhead sang more than a half dozen bullets as Hastings’s scout fired at the disappearing target. Jonah counted shots, with his left hand reaching for the security of the repeater.

  More gunfire exploded at the back of the livery, although these did not echo like those before inside the stable. These shots were instead swallowed by the night. Outside. Beyond those big open doors leading onto the black prairie.

  Jonah strained his eyes, shading them from the pale, murky lamplight—trying his best to get his night-eyes.

  A man reeled backward into the barn from the doors. Then he made out three of the gunmen crouching, turning to fire into the night with quick orange muzzle blasts.

  Then a second gunman sank back on his haunches, clutching the side of his chest. In a moment he lay down, rolled onto his belly, and did not move again.

  The last two of Hastings’s scouts yelled at one another and flung their voices to Wiser at the far side of the stables. Then the pair bolted to their feet and at a dead run plunged into the blackness of night, their pistols spitting yellow flames ahead of them.

  There came a flurry of more gunfire outside the building. Not only pistols, but big guns as well. Booming amid the cracks of the smaller-bore pistols.

  An agonizing silence followed … until Wiser called out.

  “Men? The rest of you able, get back in here so we can finish what we’ve started!”

  There came no answer.

  Hook heard the shuffle of steps in Wiser’s direction, the murmur of voices. Wiser was arguing with those two he had left in his command.

  “Jonah?”

  On guard, Hook snapped around, to the back of the stable.

  “Jonah Hook! You in there, son?”

  “Shad Sweete? That you?”

  “By damn, it is—his own self!” Sweete roared.

  He was flush with confusion, joy, relief, and then again fear. “Keep covered. This fella’s got him some gunmen left, Shad.”

  A bullet whined overhead.

  “How many, Jonah?”

  “Don’t know—”

  “You’re still mine, Hook. And the girl too!”

  “Girl, Jonah?”

  “My daughter, Shad.”

  “Hattie’s there with you?” a new voice sang out.

  Something familiar to it, but not like the hominess of Shad Sweete’s colicky bellow.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “It’s Riley Fordham, Jonah.”

  “She’s here with me, Riley,” he called into the dark.

  “Ah—Mr. Fordham!” Wiser cried. “What an unexpected pleasure. Not only will I get to watch Hook die—as slow and painfully as possible—but I will have the pleasure of killing you as well. Cutting off your head and presenting it to Colonel Usher when next I see him at Fort Laramie.”

  Wiser laughed, loud enough that Hook stood, without thinking, firing the last two shots in the one pistol, then aiming the second into the dark. One, two … then three shots—

  A scream, then many footsteps pounded the hard earth, flinging the small door aside noisily. Until there was no more noise from the front of the stables.

  Hook listened to the quiet for a long, long time.

  “Go ’round front, Fordham,” Jonah called out.

  “Already sent him, Jonah,” Sweete replied.

  Jonah cautiously stepped to the corner of the stall, listening. All he heard between each of his own steps was the labored breathing of one of them. Then the creak of the hinges at the front door.

  “The rest run off, Jonah,” Fordham called out. “Likely they’re on their way to their camp—get the rest. We gotta be making tracks, a
nd now.”

  “Fordham’s right, Jonah,” Shad said.

  “This ain’t finished.”

  They joined him, finding Hook standing over Wiser, one boot on his gun hand.

  Sweete knelt beside the man, putting his ear against his wet, dark-slicked chest. “He ain’t got long, Jonah. You plugged him in the lights twice’t. Who is he?”

  “Damn.” Hook used his boot toe to knock the man’s pistol aside. “This one had Hattie.”

  “We gotta go,” Fordham said anxiously. “Get her out—”

  “G’won, then. I appreciate what you done, coming to help me. You can go now. Save your hide, Riley.”

  “Listen, dammit. I put my own neck on the line to come back to make sure Hattie was safe. No different from you, Jonah.”

  “She’s safe.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Back there. They got her pretty sleepy. She don’t know nothing that’s going on.”

  Fordham stepped away as Jonah knelt over Wiser. Shad shifted, turning his head first this way, then that, as he listened for sounds of the gunmen returning.

  Hook stuffed the muzzle of his pistol up under Boothog’s nose. “Before you go, you sonofabitch—why don’t you die clean so you can meet your maker proper.”

  “You can go to hell, Gentile,” Wiser gurgled. “Filthy vermin—”

  “I figure I will go to hell, in the end. But right now—that’s where I’m fixing to send you. I’ll be a while getting there before I join you.” With the muzzle and front sight, he lifted Wiser’s upper lip, ramming the pistol in hard against the gums and upper teeth.

  “He know where your wife is, Jonah?”

  “He does—and I do too,” Hook answered. “Now, Boothog—let’s just come clean with your dying breath, you want to tell me where I can begin looking for my boys.”

  “I don’t have any idea, sod—”

  Jonah drew the hammer back with a loud click. “I thought I spoke good enough English for you to understand, Major. Maybe you just don’t listen good unless it hurts real bad. That’s it—ain’t it? Your kind likes to hurt … enjoys it something special. All right then.”

  Hook pulled his pistol away from Wiser’s mouth and jammed the muzzle against the man’s thigh, pulling the trigger.

  Wiser shrieked, almost biting through his lower lip as he squirmed on the floor of the barn. His pant leg smoked until enough blood seeped from the gaping bullet hole to snuff out the smoldering cloth.

  “Tell me where I start to find my boys.” He cocked the pistol and jammed the muzzle against the major’s other thigh.

  “Good glory, Jonah!”

  “Die in hell, you dumb sodbuster!”

  He fired. Wiser doubled up in pain, then Jonah brought the pistol butt down into his groin. And pointed it at the major’s scrotum.

  “Jonah!” cried Shad.

  “I’ll save your balls for later.”

  “Jonah—he ain’t gonna talk—”

  Shad was too late.

  Hook flicked the muzzle just below the bottom rib on Wiser’s left side and pulled the trigger. Wiser doubled up with a gurgling grunt, rolling onto that side as Jonah got out of his way.

  “You’re not gonna get a thing outta him, Jonah.”

  Hook kicked Wiser’s head brutally to the side, then knelt again to hold the man’s chin cupped in his left hand. “Is that right, Major? You figure I’ll never get any word out of you?”

  “J-just leave me die,” Wiser gurgled. “The rest … they’ll be coming for you now. Anywhere you go—”

  “Let’s ride, Jonah.” Shad stood.

  Behind them Fordham came up, the girl cradled across his arms. “She didn’t get hit. It’s a miracle, as much lead was—”

  “Get her on a horse, Riley. Now!” Jonah snapped.

  Fordham turned and was gone without a word.

  Shad took off, then turned after a few steps. “You coming, Jonah? We ain’t got a whole lotta time. Let that bastard die on his own. He’ll take what he knows of your boys with him.”

  “Listen to that old man, Hook. He ain’t stupid like you,” Wiser spat blood up, coughing. “You’ll never see the rest of your family again, you simple heathen.”

  Jonah gazed down at Wiser. Then turned aside, finding Sweete anxious. Maybe the old man was right. Leave Wiser to bleed like a stuck pig here in the dirt. Better to get in the saddle and ride—

  “Jonah!”

  As the old mountain man bellowed his name, Hook whirled back around. Finding Wiser pulling something from his boot—a double-bored, over-under derringer.

  It spit flame, burning a tongue of pain along Jonah’s neck as he brought his pistol up, firing at the instant Wiser’s second barrel erupted.

  Wiser’s grunt exploded from his lungs as Hook put a hand to the damp ribbon of pain low on his neck. Jonah brought his hand away as Shad stepped up. Sweete peered down at the body. “This one’s gone. You’ll live—if we get you out of here now.”

  48

  July-August, 1868

  IN FIVE DAYS they had crossed the great, black-domed expanse of wilderness that “welcomed” any man suicidal enough to try that stretch of prairie south of the Platte River from Fort Kearney into the Smoky Hill country of Kansas.

  Shad Sweete had driven them hard with what little darkness they had left that first night, leaving behind Dobe Town and its dusty huts and splatterings of yellow light as he steered them beneath the great dark map of the sky. Due south. Keeping the North Star over his right shoulder. Where he kept turning to look from time to time. Looking behind too, for he was sure they were following.

  Yet as the sun tore itself in a bloody greeting from the bowels of the earth that first morning, the old trapper had still seen no sign of pursuit. Sweete led the others down into the cottonwood and willow and alder of the Little Blue River. For the next half hour they kept their horses plodding the middle of that stream, east for a ways until he found the mouth of a ravine that he thought would do.

  It was there he told them to dismount, unsaddle, and picket the horses close by on the good grass just up the draw. When they were all back in the shade, he let the rest fall quickly asleep.

  Shad woke Jonah Hook a few hours later as the sun climbed halfway to midsky. Without many words spoken between them, he showed the Confederate where to stretch out in the tall grass of the riverbank and watch their backtrail over an immense expanse of country laid out before him.

  “Don’t you go back to sleep, Jonah.”

  Hook rubbed the grit from his eyes with both sets of knuckles. “I won’t.”

  “Hattie counting on you to keep your nose in the wind and eyes on the skyline, son.”

  “I ain’t let her down yet. Go grab you some sleep, old man. I’ll be fine.”

  Sweete stirred later when he heard footsteps. Pulling his pistol, he rolled over and pointed the weapon at the mouth of the narrow ravine as Hook was creeping in. “Someone coming?” he asked in a harsh whisper, his blood pumping full in his ears as he sat up.

  “No,” Hook whispered back. “Just come to get Fordham. His turn to stand watch.”

  Shad had glanced at the sky, finding the sun halfway to the far horizon, on the other side of the ravine now. The Southerner had stood a good five hours or better.

  Yet he felt sorrier still for Fordham as the Mormon was rousted from his sound slumber. Neither Shad nor the Danite deserter had slept in more than two days before their sudden appearance in Dobe Town, coming east from Laramie, hoping for some word of Jonah Hook or the small splinter group of Danites the Confederate was searching for. Instead of finding word among those huts clustered along the Platte River, Fordham had recognized two of Boothog Wiser’s men still in the watering hole that dark morning, just about the time the shooting broke out somewhere down the long, rutted main street in that squalid little town.

  By that time it had already been one hell of a ride for the two of them, tearing away from Laramie after a second of Jubilee Usher’s bounty hu
nters showed up at the fort, following Fordham’s trail that far. And before that second Danite died, he had spilled a little of the plans that Usher and Wiser were moving in separate battalions, north through Kansas—with orders to rendezvous at Laramie by midsummer, where they would celebrate the capture of Riley Fordham.

  And for some reason that had again made the hairs stand at the back of Shad Sweete’s neck. The two leaders dividing their command made the old mountain man feel the need for pushing east as fast and as long as their horses could carry them. A week of solid riding, brutal on his old body. Swapping lathered animals for fresh at road ranches along the way. Pushing faster, compelled by some need to hurry. Arriving in time.

  Only by the power of his medicine. By the power of Shad’s own spirit helper. Something Jonah Hook would likely never understand, he thought again now as he closed his burning eyes and tried for more fitful sleep that afternoon in the narrow ravine. He felt the ride more in his old bones than either of the younger men would ever realize.

  Getting on in winters now—too many robe seasons behind him to go acting like some young bull who could ride all day and make love all night.

  How he had longed for Toote to be curled under the shade of the willow with him as it grew hotter and the ants and beetles found his fragrant, sweaty body too much to their liking.

  They saddled at sunset and rode that night until sunrise then hid and slept and kept watch until they rode again a third night beneath the swallowing prairie sky lit only by starshine and a late-summer moon that too quickly sailed overhead.

  By the third day Hattie had begun to come around. It had taken time, day by day, hour by hour of the torture. But by the evening of that third day of hiding out the sun, as they were resaddling, refilling canteens at the little stream that Shad said they would follow south to the Solomon River, the girl had suddenly shaken her head, looked up and around at the sinking rose light in the sky, and found Riley Fordham tightening the cinch on his horse nearby.

  Hattie started screaming, leapt to her feet, her throat filled with terror as she darted off—and ran right into Shad Sweete: the big man was a frightening stranger—surely part of Jubilee Usher’s band of Danites.